The Carnegie: Civilization’s Oxnard Home

A recent trip to the East Coast was a reminder that building materials help define an aesthetic. Stone, brick and mortar suggest cultural as much as structural permanence.

Walking down big-city streets, past tall edifices and throngs of humanity, makes us part of the roaring, rumbling machinery that drives civilization. In big cities, culture as much as commerce is carved from stone.

Here in the burbs, on the other hand, culture often seems transitory--it’s made of particle board and lives above the mall. Like crops, it gets tilled, harvested and plowed under to make way for the next new thing.

So it is no surprise that on vacation we suburbanites often leave the relative safety and tranquillity--not to mention natural beauty and comfort--of home to hurl ourselves into civilization’s great urban maw. Once there we spend obscene sums of money, wait in long lines and get bounced and tossed through a torrent of humanity, all for a few hits of big-city culture.

All the while, we know our experience is meaningful because we pass by bronze monuments and between well-worn marble columns to get to it. And we enter buildings that themselves are works of art.

We return home happy to at least have the major regional arts centers--big, bunker-like and designer-labeled edifices that diminish and ultimately outlive the storefront museums, tilt-up dinner theaters and other bits and pieces of disposable culture.

We also have the Carnegie Museum, our own neoclassical icon in the middle of downtown Oxnard. The building may be more plaster and concrete than marble and granite, but it serves as a beacon to those seeking cultural enlightenment. And it has stood the test of time.

“Yes, this building is marvelous. If it wasn’t a museum, it would still be everyone’s idea of what a museum should look like,” said director Suzanne Bellah, adding with a little laugh, “maybe with a postmodern addition in the back.”

The Carnegie, a relatively small but grand structure in the Greco-Roman style, was built to be a library. In 1906, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie was passing out free libraries to cities around the country, and Oxnard petitioned for and got one.

“It is incredible when you think that the early people of Oxnard were able to apply and get a Carnegie-donated building out here in the wild California of the early part of the century,” Bellah said.

The building served many civic functions over the years, from library and City Hall to convention center. In 1980, it was refurbished and reopened as a cultural arts center, later to be renamed the Carnegie Art Museum, owned and operated by the city of Oxnard.

Carnegie’s original intention was to “bring knowledge to the common man,” Bellah said. “People couldn’t own all the words, but through a library they could have access to all those words.”

And now, through the museum, they have access to the art. Today, Bellah said, they are again using the building as it was intended--as an educational institution for regular folk.

“And the building itself is very welcoming,” she said, “so it lends itself to that purpose.”

Bellah personifies the Carnegie ideal. Raised in Riverside, she is the youngest child in what she described as “a lower-middle but working-class family.”

In high school in the early ‘70s she was eager to learn about art and culture of the ancient world, but there weren’t enough museums to go around.

One year, school officials rewarded the straight-A students with a field trip to the L.A. County Museum of Art, an experience Bellah said was “a revelation.”

“I had been reading about Egyptians and the Greeks and Romans--and there was the actual stuff,” she said. “If I had been allowed to touch any of it, I felt like I would be reaching back to the person who made it and the whole civilization represented.”

The experience reaffirmed her interest in antiquities and ignited a new one in museums.

“For me, the museum wasn’t just this dusty place,” she said. “It kept this whole human accumulation of achievements going.”

Bellah went on to get a B.A. in classics and anthropology from UCSB, and a master’s degree and certificate of museum practice from the University of Michigan. She was named curator of the Carnegie 13 years ago and became the director in 1995.

“This whole path that I got to explore was started because some local school tour was taken to a major museum,” she said. So a major aim of her institution is to give young children a positive first experience of a museum.

“For us that means putting together content that is educational but also welcoming enough that children don’t end up saying at age 25 ‘I was in a museum once, and it was really boring so I never went back.’ ”

All of which means that in addition to its other functions--tending to and adding to a permanent collection, nurturing local artists and curating exhibits--the museum also provides school tour programs, art classes and an interactive media center that is organized for every art show. And it does all of it on a tight budget and in a modest space.

The museum survived the cutback years of the early ‘80s, Bellah said, because civic leaders were committed to supporting the institution and what it represents.

“A couple of councilmen said, ‘If we don’t fund it enough to let it at least exist, it would be like selling our children.’ They were talking, of course, about the place and the art collection. They wanted to keep the historical and cultural links going. This building is an emblem of city pride.”

* Currently at the Carnegie Art Museum: “Eminent Delights: Images of Time, Space and Matter and Imaginary Friends,” recent works by Christine Brennan, at 424 South C St., Oxnard, through May 16.

Staff writer Wendy Miller can be reached by e-mail at wendy.miller@aol.com.

* OUT & ABOUT: Scandinavian traditions will soon come to life at CLU’s festival, and a white separatist trial will be lived out on stage in Ojai. B8